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| Open CASCADE, simulation integrator / News / Built with Open CASCADE, the C ... | | Built with Open CASCADE, the CollabCAD Application for Collaborative CAD via the Internet Is Available for Beta Testing |
| CollabCAD provides one or more designers with secure, simultaneous access to a CAD model |
Paris, February 28, 2001 – Developed by the Computer Aided Design Group of National Informatics Centre (NIC) in New Delhi, India, the CollabCAD application for accessing a number of online CAD systems is now available as a free download for beta testing at http://www.collabcad.com/download.html. This Web-enabled, distributed software is designed to provide one or more designers with secure, simultaneous access to a CAD model. It can be thought of as a geometry workbench that allows accessing geometry in the STEP, IGES, STL and VRML formats for interfacing with third-party solutions. CollabCAD was built using the Open CASCADE modeling kernel, an open-source software that can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.opencascade.com/getoc/index.html.
Based on distributed architecture computing, CollabCAD offers numerous advantages: it is platform-independent thanks to its use of JAVA code, has audio output for guidance and provides a very affordable solution for both collaborative CAD and development. It will be implemented on ISO 10303 [STEP] standards for product data exchange. The beta version can be downloaded on Windows NT/98, Linux and Sun Solaris platforms.
After beta testing, the NIC plans to release a commercial version of the software with enriched features for industrial partners and educational and research institutes.
According to Dr. H.K. Suhas, head of the CollabCAD project, "Open CASCADE's geometric modeling kernel provided us with all the tools we needed to interface with commercial CAD applications and to access model geometry. Only open-source software gives us the possibility to carry out this type of development."
Services from Open CASCADE enhance development efforts
NIC developers created CollabCAD after obtaining the Open CASCADE components from the http://www.opencascade.com site soon after the announcement in January 2000 of its availability for downloading in Open Source. In September 2000, the NIC team broadened its already significant hands-on experience with guidance from the Open CASCADE services team by ordering four weeks of on-site training and support. This enabled stepping up development of the application. |
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